Six years ago in midtown Manhattan, Tan Mu came into her studio everyday to paint some dots. One small set after another, it became No Signal. The painting refers to the familiar image for those of us growing up with bulky CRT televisions: the snowy screen accompanied by the hiss of white noise. It also refers to the signal behind No Signal: a small fraction of that speckled image is in fact influenced by the cosmic microwave background. A whisper of the early universe. Now I’m reminded of the lecture about the first direct observation of gravitational waves I attended at Tsinghua ten years ago, on the remarkable endeavors of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) that confirmed a key prediction in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. That detected wave came from the collision of a pair of black holes. Then there’s the recent news of an AI’s counterintuitive design that seemed like “alien things or AI things” for the physicists at Caltech but could improve the sensitivity of LIGO by an estimated 10-15%, a leap at the sub-proton scale.